15 ms·
In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over 1 million SROs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
by legitster 5y ago
In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over 1 million SROs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy) in an effort to remove slums or just neglect at increasing property value. There are now over half of a million homeless. It's honestly impressive the number is not more.
For the 1.2 billion dollars they are spending, if all of the apartments were built to the spec of a roadside motel room (~350 sq ft - or more than double the average SRO), they should realistically be able to build over 10,000 units for that kind of money (that's including California's exorbitant cost per square foot).
It would be like if the government banned motorcycles, and then said "okay, instead we'll make you a nice, compact crossover", and then handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows.
What's frustrating is that SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers! How much better a use of government money it would have been to just improve the situation in SROs than to quietly let them shutter and hope the poverty they represented just disappeared with them.
- mwint 5y agoBasically, we’d be better off if the government had done nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.
- long_time_gone 5y agoMore like, we'd be better off if voters didn't demand short-term actions with negative long-term effects.
- jvanderbot 5y agoPrecisely this. In LA there are constant referendums about homelessness, in CA massive budget increases, and yet, nobody will allow a shelter or multi-family unit to be constructed in their neighborhood, lest their soaring land value peak. In CA, it's my firm belief that people have a tad too much power over the minutae of government operations. What did we even elect people for if we are going to try to solve everything with referendums and protests?
- sfe22 5y agoSo CA is too democratic in your opinion? It should slide more towards tyranny?
- jvanderbot 5y agoAbsolutely not. Democracy can be fair and open elections, not crowdsourced legislation.
- setr 5y agoSounds more like too much direct democracy, and needs to slide further towards representative.
- sfe22 5y agoThe emperor can also be your representative, and so is Putin to russians, and the slightly more complex US system. The slider is democracy to tyranny, just because we dont yet have democracy in most or all countries doesn't change anything here. We just have twisted its meaning to describe some decision power when choosing tyrants. Either all decide equally-democracy , or fewer to very few or one-tyranny.
- rsync 5y agoIs that your opinion on marijuana policy in California? Which issues, pray tell, are best governed by local control and which are best governed by top-down, remote decision makers?
- imtringued 5y agoYou mean too little direct democracy. Only a handful of people are actually engaging in local politics and therey are no longer representing the community as a whole. Special interest groups are the opposite of democracy.
- Jarwain 5y agoFeels like a flamebaity false-dichotomy. Is it really tyrannical to, say, elect officials to act on our behalf and consider long-term impacts and x-order effects? Because to me that just sounds a little more "republic" and a little less "direct democracy".
- kjkjadksj 5y agoVoters didn’t order the SROs in bunker hill destroyed. Follow the money. Who stood to gain in the time when that SRO was raized into a parking lot then turned into the hotel Bonaventure in downtown LA? It wasn’t voters, it was a handful of politically connected people.
- legitster 5y agoI think you may underrate how much people in the local community hated SROs. It was definitely politically popular at the time to remove them.
- asdff 5y agoYeah, voting whites hated the low income blacks latinos and asians who rented these, doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
- GlobalFrog 5y agoAnd why not allow them now? If you compare the housing market to the job market, the general opinion (in the US) is that there should be very few restrictions for jobs in terms of low salaries and work conditions (and the lack of unions allows that). The same reasonning should allow to have low quality housing but cheap. But there are no downside for the ones who profit from employing people with very low salaries and very poor work conditions, whereas letting exist cheap housing indeed makes the property value around them go down. So it is really a choice made today not to reduce homelessness.
- long_time_gone 5y agoYou can drill-down to a specific SRO building to find a unique story, but the overwhelming trend from 1960-2010 was to eliminate SRO because of health and safety concerns. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
- eberkund 5y agoCollectively we would be better off but many individuals would not be which is the crux of the problem.
- imtringued 5y agoA positive interest rate demands short term actions with immediate effects and disregards negative long term effects. Getting rid of positive interest rates requires eliminating all monopolies. It is a cat and mouse game but it is THE cat and mouse game. If you win you win big.
- rhizome 5y agoWell, what should have been done is enforce laws (and pass legislation if necessary) to prevent the SROs from being allowed to decline into slums.
- vasco 5y agoEven if SROs would be slums, they would be better than the street slums of LA. How is a tent city better than a decrepit building?
- richardfey 5y agoThe tent cannot fall on your head? But I get what you mean.
- worik 5y ago> The tent cannot fall on your head? That is a good point. Tent cities are preferable to poorly built dangerous masonry.
- asdff 5y agoWell they were often considered slums by politicians by who lived there, not by the craftsmanship of the build.
- imtringued 5y agoI once saw a very beautiful large building on hackernews. Then one person commented that it was turned into a dozen condos so that it was affordable to everyone (including racial minorities). The next HN comment immediately talked about how that building is a slum. You literally cannot see the residents inside. It's impossible to tell. It's the same building but now somehow it was ruining the character of the neighborhood. Strange.
- dionidium 5y agoThen you're just back to where you began -- a situation where government is going to need to takeover, because nobody can make a profit selling flophouses to indigent single men if they're required by law to make them as nice as middle-class apartments. What modern Westerners seem entirely unwilling to acknowledge or accept is that if you require by decree that all accommodations look like middle-class accommodations, then you'll absolutely be able to get rid of all those worse accommodations, but you won't have done anything to address the reasons they existed in the first place.
- mym1990 5y agoIncentives for governments to deliver good results are much lower than in the private markets(not non-existent though), which is why governments are so bad at capital allocation. Its almost like the government wants to look like they are doing something, without ever actually following through.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoI think you misunderstand the incentives. The elimination of the residential hotels and boarding houses of yesteryear (to be replaced with two-or-three bedroom apartments) was a deliberate exercise in class warfare, and the governments in question were largely delivering what voters wanted. The remarkable part is the people who still defend the measures as for-the-poor's-own-good.
- mym1990 5y agoI very well might, but my particular observation is with government behavior towards most projects, not just the one in this headline.
- 999900000999 5y agoI don't buy the argument SROs were removed to get rid of Slums. In fact, my first apartment, ironically in LA was a very small step up from an SRO. It had a private bathroom, but not much else. Now the city has effectively made this housing illegal to build. These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos. It's never been about helping people, Garcerti and the boys just ripped off the people of Los Angeles. A more realistic plan would be to offer relocation assistance or at the very least relax building requirements. None of that will happen, my first, my beautiful 600$ apartment is now 1300$. I miss the city LA used to be. I had the privilege of living in a neighborhood with 3$ bottles of Soju and 4$ Tortas. It was absolutely amazing.
- wolverine876 5y ago> These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos. What is luxurious about them? Or are you referring to the price?
- legitster 5y agoMy grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.
- wolverine876 5y ago> My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today. Are you defining a unit with a kitchen and bathroom as a 'luxury apartment'? Would you live without them?
- nine_k 5y agoIf the other option is living on the street, why not? The problem is that not everyone has a well-paid IT job, and some people barely make ends meet. These people need a place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with many corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to build and maintain. It's still much better than living in a tent as your primary residence!
- wolverine876 5y agoWhere do all these numbers and other claims come from? Without evidence, we're all writing works of fiction - compelling stories, but not reality. > handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a company that builds snowplows. Who is analogous to the snowplow building company? > SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free to taxpayers! What do we know about SROs and their outcomes?
- asdff 5y ago>What do we know about SROs and their outcomes? That they housed people who today live in nylon tents with no plumbing/hvac/security.
- wolverine876 5y agoWhat is that based on? And what did SROs provide? Did they provide plumbing, HVAC, and security? I never heard of SROs being known for their a/c and security, and the plumbing didn't have a great reputation.
- asdff 5y agoThey provided your own room with a lock on the door and a bed, and a shared bathroom and kitchen, for a price that was substantially lower than any other unit of housing on offer in the area, so yes they provided these things. If these things were lacking, then it was the state of the times in code enforcement and you would expect these things to be lacking in any lower income housing unit during this time as well. That doesn't mean a modern SRO would be filled with any more code violations than your typical low income apartment today since code enforcement has gotten more modern.
- wolverine876 5y agoAgain, what is all that based on? A story without evidence is fiction - a nice story, but not reality.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoThis...is not wrong. Pioneer Square in Seattle used to have a lot of flop houses, part of it being the original "skid row" (logs skid to the saw mill, really muddy and not a desirable place to live). My grandfather in Spokane unwittingly ran a rooming house we cousins called the "empty arms" (inherited from his sister), which housed a lot of people who were just barely getting by. Seattle's flop houses are mostly gone now...Spokane's are disappearing rapidly and is creating a new homeless problem in an area that used to be fairly immune to it (because of access to cheap housing). China/Hong Kong and some of Asia have created a new spin on SROs with capsule and pod housing, China leverages a lot of sub-basements for SRO housing (without access to windows because underground), while Japan has cheap 2.5 tatami sized small room apartments. None of these would be allowed in the west, they are barely living, but maybe we should start thinking about them as an alternative to a much worse situation?
- legitster 5y agoPublix in Seattle is a perfect example. A developer bought them out, them combined every 2-3 SROs to make a (still small) luxury apartment. I do not begrudge the developer. If you were to propose the opposite (taking an existing set of luxury apartments, and subdivide them into more rent paying units), it would probably be more profitable, but you would never get the plans approved.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago> it would probably be more profitable, but you would never get the plans approved. I'm not sure it would be in this market. Catering to people with money is pretty profitable. Catering to lower income tenants...even with more scale on your side, might not work out, especially with the extra overheads involved (with Seattle's strict eviction laws, for example). Most small-scale landlords in Seattle are trying to get away from even moderate income housing that might require them to fund moving costs because of future rent increases (as well as rising eviction costs...it doesn't make much sense to rent to anyone but a very well funded and low risk techie).
- 5y ago
- peter303 5y agoSROs have returned as urban co-housing dorms for z-llenials. They consist of a cramped bedroom, sometimes with a private bath. But shared cooking, dining and recreation spaces.
- asdff 5y agoThe only thing is they often cost a lot relative to what they are and therefore aren't exactly a viable solution to someone who can't even manage rent with roomates